June 20 to September 2, 2018
235 Bowery, between Stanton and Rivington streets
New York City, newmuseum.org

Thomas Bayrle is a systems man. This five-decade survey at the New Museum, whose 115 works include paintings, moving sculptures, prints, textiles, wallpaper, video, and more, delves into systems of culture, politics, economics, infrastructure. “Playtime,” is the German artist’s first major museum show in New York. Although hardly a household name in this country, Bayrle is something of a national treasure in his native land.

A preoccupation with repetition and dissemination predated Bayrle’s becoming an artist. Born in Berlin in 1937, he had worked already in advertising and publishing, and was first exposed to mechanization as an apprentice at a weaving company. But don’t picture young Bayrle as a cog in anyone’s machine: He threw himself into the student protest movement of the 1960s. “Playtime” reflects the tension between these dynamic experiences.  

The two floors of this show present such different visitor experiences that it might color your ultimate takeaway. Starting on the fourth floor, I found myself in the company of Bayrle’s signature idioms, the “super forms” and “praying machines,” along with a selection of small portrait prints, and a hanging textile. The “super forms” are images that comprise a large object tessellated from myriad tiny versions of the same. For example, Flugzeug [Airplane] (1982-3), Bayrle’s biggest work in this series at approximately 26 by 44 feet, is a photo collage of more than one million airplanes. At first, these look like small exact replicas of the macro image, but upon closer inspection it is revealed that Bayrle has taken a Warholian approach. Despite the mass, each digit is unique, juxtaposing ideas of mass production with a distinct artist’s hand. These slight alterations mark the difference between a consumer ad and a more interesting art object. As Bayrle says in his catalog interview, “Even in billions, everything is singular and unique. Every cell, every atom, they are singular. I think that’s the richness of art, to define this singularity in the mass.”  

These mammoth collages are set to an odd audio accompaniment at the New Museum, emanating from a selection of four of Bayrle’s “praying machines” in the middle of the gallery. Comprised of car, plane, or motorcycle engines with exposed moving gears, belts, and pulleys, these objects each have their own built-in soundtrack. The robotic sculptures, individualized but inhuman, splice together human voices and mechanical growls. As most feature Catholic prayers, the high-ceilinged gallery takes on a cathedral-like atmosphere, inspiring reverence in visitors. The heavy use of Catholic iconography and symbolism in both this series and other works might incorrectly make one think that Bayrle is Catholic. He is actually Protestant, but from a young age was drawn to Catholicism by the structure and rhythm of its traditions and imagery. In the praying machines, Bayrle unsteadies that rhythm, making the soulless robots recite the rosary (another mechanical process), taking on a human effort to save themselves.

The repetition within the objects is echoed in the space – the neutral colors, the aural buzz from the machines and visual buzz from the repeated super forms. However, this is oddly broken by the inclusion of the only hanging textile: iPhone Pietà (2017). An instance, perhaps, of curatorial tongue-in-cheek anticipating visitors capturing their visit with a photo or video (which, during my visit, was a popular trend with the praying machines), ultimately I thought the piece felt out of place. It’s blue fabric and lack of the traditional super form patterning didn’t fit among the monotone paper and metal. True, it did connect thematically with its interesting contemporary meditation on technology as religion and the worship of the smartphone, but ultimately this break in the organized system of the gallery went too far.

The sparseness of this floor is all but thrown out the window in the near-clutter of the almost 100 objects downstairs. And yet, this part too – with its proliferation of neon-colored wallpapers, prints, videos, and paintings (either still or his “painted machines,” whose small parts move to reveal a new image) – cleverly reinforces Bayrle’s central themes. Going through the space, shocked in my transition from the upper floor, I thought: Where do I fit in amidst this overwhelming repetition?

With his investigation of individualism and early adoption of innovative, pre-digital technologies, Bayrle made his mark. This legacy was explored at a July 19th panel at the museum, “Social Fabric: Thomas Bayrle’s Expanded Network,” which featured artists Jordan Wolfson, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Lena Henke. Moderated by art historian Alex Kitnick, each artist addressed how their work deals with various of Bayrle’s themes, including digital technologies, systems, production, and – most prominently – the relationship between pop aesthetics and politics. This younger generation meditated on how subversion and any definition of “radical” isn’t just about materiality and process – as in Bayrle’s inventive copy techniques, or in contemporary digital video art – but has to include a sense of the artist as witness to change, of art as intervention. For Jordan Wolfson, the contemporary artist has to “make pop and politics subvert each other.”

Bayrle’s “painted machine” Mao (1966) is an early example of just this process of intervention. In this piece, small moving wooden pieces slowly morph the paramount leader’s portrait into the communist star. Bayrle would later witness communism first hand in visits to China in the late 1970s. (Fun fact: His Mao actually predates Warhol’s by about five years.)

Among the plethora of objects on this floor, there was one piece that I kept going back to, placed in an alcove at the back of the gallery, almost shrine-like in its forced intimacy. In Himmelfahrt [Ascension] (1988), crucified Jesus is made of fractured, repeated images of the autobahn, which also constitutes the work’s background. Looking at this piece I was reminded of the voices in the sculptures upstairs – the prayers on repeat in a gallery-cum-cathedral – reset for the road: I could imagine someone praying for traffic to ease up among a chorus of car horns. Standing in front of Jesus on his cross, I kept trying to pick apart the comedy and the tragedy of this contemporary purgatory. I tried to reconcile the image of a monumental religious icon slipping into the scene like a commercial break in the middle of regularly scheduled programming. The geometric energy of the repeated autobahn making up the vulnerable Christ forced me to stop and look and think about the disruption taking place. This experience captured the show as a whole: at once an overwhelming fun house questioning the structures by which we live, and a wake up call to shift my perspective within the routines of daily life. Despite all of the stimuli of the gallery, I felt asked to focus and notice the quirks throughout – the distortions of the tiny airplanes, the not-quite-aligned edges of the autobahn-Jesus shards, the slight shudder of the painted machines’ movements. I left wondering if looking closely at the kinks in the system would become a trend of its own.

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May 2 to June 30, 2018
533 West 19th Street, New York, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York CIty, www.davidzwirner.com

Very loud music greets visitors to David Zwirner’s 19th Street space. The white cube gallery has been transformed with soft, lilac carpeting and acoustic panels. These serve to dampen a multitude of sounds that fluctuate during Jordan Wolfson’s 8’24” video, Riverboat song (2017-2018). There’s also a sense of comfort in these gentle colors and textures – elegant  features that contrast with the disconcerting informality of what comes next: the exposed wires and weights on the back of sixteen screens aligned in a massive four-by-four grid. The doorway to the gallery frames this rear view, shielding the projection. This installation establishes power dynamics that soon become evident in the video itself: the space comforts, but the arrangement controls, forcing visitors up against the back wall (the furthest distance possible from the exit), caught between the screen and two large speakers. You feel small, particularly if, as this viewer chose to, you sit down, sandwiched between these mammoth screens and the wall.

The content of Riverboat song intensifies this juxtaposition of comfort and control. The piece is a montage, for the most part featuring a cast of animated characters. There are two “gay” dressed and acting horses, a naked crocodile, three grunge-styled rats, a Huckleberry Finn meets Alfred E. Neuman boy, and a witch. The boy is familiar from Wolfson’s earlier work,  Colored sculpture (2016). Riverboat song opens with a “down the rabbit hole” moment in which  the boy sinks into a giant teacup. This is followed by a series of vignettes: Finn being chopped up by the witch, Finn dancing seductively in Louboutins to Iggy Azalea’s “Work” (2014), the crocodile dancing, the rodents smoking on an airplane, all of the characters sharing pieces of a monologue narrated by Wolfson, Finn jumping in front of a mirror, more smoking rodents, and finally Finn splashing around in his own golden shower. The video closes with an amalgam of YouTube clips of robots, sensually dancing women, violent video games, and one man mercilessly beating another (this last was the inspiration for Wolfson’s notorious 2017 Whitney Biennial VR piece, Real violence).

Riverboat song is permeated by sexual aggression. Pinned up against the wall, I was both surprised and transfixed – perhaps most by the monologue section of the video, which lasted for about a quarter of the piece. This was the “scene” that most forcefully situated the piece within Wolfson’s recent body of work. The monologue – spread between Wolfson’s animated cast, though predominantly spoken by a pantsless Finn – is about a relationship in which one partner manipulates the other for personal gain. The male voice (Wolfson’s) talks about “you” doing things for him: cleaning, cooking, sexual favors, and staying with him despite his emotional manipulation because of a twisted sense of obligation that leaves “you” completely under his control. While the “you” in the monologue is never specified as female, and could just as easily be male, I read it as very heteronormative  – possibly as a woman myself, possibly due to the current Me Too movement bringing attention to female harassment and assault. The casual aggression in the tone of the monologue, both in Wolfson’s inflection and the blasé positions of various characters (penis in hand, in the bathtub, over brunch), matched the riveting and gut-wrenching spectatorship of Real violence, and the emotional instability of Colored sculpture (tellingly set to “When a Man Loves a Woman”). At first, the off-hand and personal tone of this monologue creates the illusion of lovingness, although this soon melts into distinctive domination, much like the discomfort that emerges out of the initial safe feeling of the installation.

Finn takes a distinct pleasure in himself throughout the video – clearly aroused by his talk of supremacy in the monologue, and later luxuriating in his own urine. He splashes around so much it becomes comical as well as uncomfortably voyeuristic, due the length of the clip. However, even in this moment I am so transfixed as to be unable to simply stand up and walk out, leaving the final, over-the-top clip unviewed. Perhaps this is due to innate human curiosity and the need to know what happens next, or maybe something about the anthropomorphism of the characters results in an uncanny feeling of being watched, and thus somehow known or possessed. For whatever reason, I am strangely comfortable on this carpet, back against the wall, and watch Riverboat song again and again.

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May 5 to June 25, 2016
525 West 19th Street
New York, 212 727 2070

At David Zwirner, Jordan Wolfson’s puppet, totally helpless against the insistent tug of thick chains, inspires a deep sympathy. Yet, its vulnerability springs precisely from its lifelessness. The title, Colored sculpture (2016), fails so utterly to encapsulate the presence and experience of this work. Yet, simultaneously, this overly simple characterization reminds a viewer of the objecthood of this figure, which can, at moments, feel so terribly real. The disappointing artificiality of its intelligence swims into evidence in the bouncing, unnatural animations that dance through the figure’s deep-set eye sockets. Both point to empathy, but also mark him as an object of contempt; Colored sculpture shifts in and out of the semblance of sentience. Even as Wolfson takes advantage of our susceptibility to perceive humanity everywhere, the emotive response is interrupted by the cruelty with which this uncanny figure is tossed about on his scaffold stage. Does the perception of humanity precede or emerge from the violence that is being wreaked upon the body that Wolfson presents?

Heavy steel chains and a limp form clatter and scrape across the gallery’s concrete floor. Mechanized pulleys move back and forth across parallel tracks, distributing and retracting the chain supports in a stilted choreography. The chains withdraw and the metal body ascends to reveal the caricatured form of a boy whose eyes, made of LCD screens, dart around the room to meet onlookers’ stares, tracking them in real time with face-recognition software. Mouth fixed in an expression that is both grimace of pain and hostile affront, this boy — less Huck Finn than Pinocchio, sans-nose — sways, suspended. The strange grace of this figure, as he is gently raised, toes seeming to articulate a regretful caress as they leave the floor, becomes even more fragile and poignant when, a moment later, this precious burden falls unceremoniously, clamorously to the ground.

The thunder of metal is joined precipitously by the Percy Sledge’s swelling vocals as “When A Man Loves a Woman” unexpectedly blasts from speakers overhead. The gallery is filled with a carnival’s promise of seedy spectacle and thrill; here though, you don’t have to pay to watch a chained bear, or boy, dance on chains from behind the security of a metal fence. The uninhibited violence of this display — expressed in the punished surfaces of the floor and the clown’s chipped, ravaged face — breaks brutally upon a viewer. An attendant, earbuds securely inserted, stands watchful, lest visitors stray too close.

Colored sculpture is a study in sadism. However, it remains unclear on which side of the fence the viewer identifies: as aggressor and instigator of this pathetic display, or as with empathy for this vulnerable humanoid creature. In one sense, Colored sculpture is its own master and puppet, wielding the whip to its own torturous destruction. After all, the boyish form is one with the chains mechanism that pulls it about in a self-contained cycle of violence and suffering. In a 2012 interview with Stefan Kalmár, Wolfson said that, “imagining something is a way of understanding to decide if it’s wrong or right,” posing his works as trials of moral fortitude. This sculpture comes to us as a question, a curiosity, about a world in which we can treat people as objects and objects as human beings.

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